Shawn Michaels once gave the sternest of backstage warnings to a WWE colleague after a mishap in the course of a match.
Michaels is widely considered one in all the best skilled wrestlers of all time after a decorated in-ring profession that spanned a long time and included multiple world championships.
Today, Michaels helps steer the careers of the following generation of wrestling upstarts. He heads up NXT, which effectively serves as WWE’s developmental division.
Alongside good pal Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque who serves as the corporate’s Chief Content Officer and Head of Creative, the duo make a preferred and successful pairing when it comes to making a very watchable product.
If Michaels knows what he wants and what fans wish to see, it’s comprehensible he’s imparted that wisdom unto others through the years, not least through the latter years of his profession.
Former WWE Hardcore Champion Maven has detailed one run-in he had with the Hall of Fame star, who he insists didn’t care much for him when he first began wrestling for the corporate back in 2001.
“He was working with me and I used to be extremely green,” said Maven of his inexperience on the time. “ This was early in my profession and I definitely didn’t have the desire to make myself look silly but, furthermore, I didn’t have the desire to make [Michaels] look silly.
“At this point, I didn’t know he didn’t like me, and I had hoped that there could still be a level of mutual respect for one other. Those hopes were all dashed the night we stepped into Albuquerque, Latest Mexico.”
The wrestler turned YouTuber went on to detail a match during which he worked with Michaels in town, which sits high above sea level – some 5,000 feet no less.
Explaining that wrestling in such conditions takes a really different style of conditioning, Maven said he was warned in regards to the risks that night, and so it was perhaps with a level of foolhardiness that he attempted one in all Michaels signature moves – with disastrous consequences.
“I used to be on my back attempting to do a move that The Rock and [Michaels] does, a nip-up,” he went on.
“It was pretty easy for me to do at the moment, I could do it normally with or without hands, it didn’t matter, I used to be athletic enough that I could pull the move off – at sea level!
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“Being at over 5,000 feet of elevation after I went to do my nip-up, I realised I had absolutely no air in my lungs and I got no lift… so after I went to pop up, I didn’t pop up, I landed on my butt [and] my back.”
Seeing Michaels, Rock and lots of others nail a nip-up with aplomb had turn into a daily thing for fans through the years, so seeing Maven fail so badly with it apparently left the group that night most amused – and Michaels very much not.
“When you look back then, by association, he looked bad,” admitted the now 47-year-old.
“Once the match was over and once the group got chuckle out of a rookie not landing an easy move, we got backstage and Shawn laid into me.
“He told me: ‘When you’re not 100 precent you may do and land a move, don’t do it.’
“I just about kept my mouth shut. I attempted to spit out a reason, but he didn’t wish to hear it.
“He wasn’t unsuitable, on this case, I used to be 100% unsuitable.”
59-year-old Michaels boasts the experience of a wrestling profession that began within the late Eighties, and got here to an end in 2010, during which period he won the WWE and World Heavyweight title on 4 occasions together with a litany of other accolades.
